Back in 2014, “bird flu” was flooding headlines. And well this year, it’s happening again. ‪@ryuji_chua‬ explains what you need to know.

Just like humans and other animals, birds sometimes get sick. And sometimes, they have their own pandemics. That’s what that was. Birds everywhere got infected with the H5N1 virus, or bird flu, millions of whom were birds in factory farms like chickens, ducks, and turkeys.

In fact, because factory farms cram so many animals tightly together in filthy conditions, they’re actually ideal environments for viruses like bird flu to break out. And so this year, unsurprisingly to experts, bird flu is back.

Since January of 2022, the USDA estimates that over 47 million birds have been infected with it, just in the US. For perspective, that’s like the entire human population of Spain.

Whenever this happens, the important thing to do is to contain the spread of the virus—so it doesn’t infect every other bird on the planet or start the next human pandemic.

And the way that humans do this is that as soon as one bird on a farm tests positive, they take the entire flock they came from, and kill all of them. And this has just been an animal welfare disaster.

According to a report by the ‪@AnimalWelfareInstitute‬ based on ‪@UsdaGov‬ data, the 3 main ways we’ve been doing this so far are suffocating the birds by filling barns with CO2, choking the birds by filling barns with foam and this thing called “VSD”.

Now of those 3 methods, VSD is the cheapest and therefore also the most common, by far. But it’s also the one that causes the birds the most suffering. It stands for “ventilation shutdown” and it refers to the process of shutting down the ventilation in a barn, followed by turning up the heat, gas, or steam. This causes the barn’s temperature to skyrocket, essentially turning it into a giant oven, and the birds die by suffocating or overheating, often after suffering for hours.

In fact, ‪@AnimalOutlook‬ recently obtained public records from experiments that were testing VSD on chickens, and this is what those experiments looked like.

One worker who helped do this to over 5 million birds called this cooking the animals alive, and due to the extreme suffering this causes the animals, vets have called this the most inhumane method available.

So, if bird flu keeps spreading, will it cause the next human pandemic? Well historically, the bird flu virus hasn’t been very good at infecting humans. And since 2003, only 865 humans have been infected. However, over half those cases were fatal, and there’s no guarantee that things won’t change. Viruses mutate all the time, and it wouldn’t be all that surprising if one day bird flu became a big problem for us as well.

To summarize, humans have crammed animals in conditions that not only cause them extreme suffering, but also create ideal environments for diseases to break out. Then, when diseases do break out, which by the way, causes them to suffer just like when we get sick, our solution is to kill them by using methods that cause them even more extreme suffering.

And while the animal agriculture industry is responsible for this, so are consumers who endorse this cruelty by buying the eggs, chicken wings and other animal products that these animals are made to suffer for.

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Image Credit: ‪@WeAnimalsMedia‬

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